Distributed systems have become commonplace in today's ever-expanding global computing environment. Distributed systems provide a collection of independent systems that process tasks on multiple systems in such a way that system boundaries appear transparent to the user. That is, it appears to the user that all the processing is performed on the user's local system. Today's distributed systems also provide local logging of activities that occur on each independent system to provide, for example, performance measurement of the distributed system or troubleshooting of the distributed system in the event of processing errors, etc. However, many activities in a distributed system environment affect more than one system. Such activities are known as “cross-system” activities. Examples of cross-system activities include changes in services provided by the multiple systems or changes in software libraries or application program interfaces provided by the multiple systems.
Logging is also performed for such cross-system activities. In current distributed system environments, log entries for a cross-system activity are made in local logs. However, these local logs do not record the cross-system characteristics of the activity. For example, these local logs do not record data specifying the system on which these cross-system activities originated, nor do they record the cause of the “log-worthy” activity. As a consequence, today's systems fail to provide full characterization of cross-system activities.
Therefore, there is a need in the art of distributed systems to provide logging of cross-system characteristics of cross-system activities and events.